On Drifting / A Short Story

This is a story on drifting.

It is midday and I am dreaming. A summer wind hot with sleep has carried itself to the depths of our house, through rooms and corridors and windows that rattle like those old trucks you see sometimes when you're on the highway. It is a violent rattle. The sunlight followed in places----where it existed, it painted the walls with warmth, and one could feel the earth steal a slow sigh of comfort. And you in the bedroom, reading. I had given the book to you long ago, and you had been meaning to flip by it. You were just finishing off a stray page when I came in, but you did not look, and you did not smile. It was so beautiful outside I imagined everyone cartwheeling across the city in joyous celebration, it could have been so. I wouldn't have known, because I was looking straight at your eyes, and they were a little sad. Your pupils moved slowly as you read the page, like as if you couldn't concentrate. Through the curtains the sky shone a smiling white, vast and intense and fading into a creeping redness that seeped in through the corners, riding atop cigarette-smoke clouds. You had left me by now. The sound of your suitcase creaking as it swung, fading moment after moment is still fresh in my memory, I had bought the suitcase. It was green but you painted it colourful and wrote your initials on them in a handwriting deliberately unlike mine. I had chuckled at the time, and said how beautiful it looked. It did look beautiful, it is faded now. You are still here but you never leave the bedroom, you are a shackle, you are a chain. Nowadays I don't bother, I am a coward, I am a snail.

When you snore I creep silently out of the second floor window and drift. I have been to many clouds, I have named them. They disappear often but they always come back. They are the souls of stars. They have given me wishes and taken me closer to see the stars twinkling like giant white orbs of a million overwhelming moments, and one after another they hit me straight into my heart through the centre of my forehead and then I smile and say, "I am alright." They are true friends, the stars. I am especially fond of Orion, for they are there every night for me, whenever I look up. They are smiling and smoking cigarettes. I sing to them. They like drifting. In the mornings you magically disappear from your bedroom and I can smell your perfume on the pillow. It makes me soft and fuzzy and I grow blue and wish it was night so I could have a smoke on the terrace. And look at the stars.

You are now a creature I don't understand, and it confuses me. I fear you might be growing a tail. Sometimes I feel that disheartening bump on your ass. Your teeth are longer and you have produced hair on your pupils. I think I can safely say that you are different. And like a wild beast that hunts in the shadows of jaguar rain-forests, I fear you may disappear, slink away quietly into the night while I am busy drifting. Things have a knack of changing abruptly, especially atmospheres. I am now falling, and I can see the stars flashing across my face like bullets of light shooting upwards around me towards the sky. It is all too overwhelming----

When I wake up, I stay still. There you are, next to me, asleep, drooling all over the pillow, as is your custom, and in all probability, dreaming something horrible yourself. But then there's that tail of yours, knocking the cat off the linen.

But the night is young, and it is sweeping the sky with frenzy and confusion,
and that is her custom. All one can do is accept the flow.